I am a citizen of the United States of America. In this country, I can criticize my government as intelligently, as profanely, or as stupidly as I wish. I can call the president of the nation an unintelligent, uninspiring, and incompetent leader — which I have done. I can call my representative in Congress a buffoonish party hack — which I have done — and urge his removal from office by the voters. I can attack the policies enacted by government at all levels as often as I wish.
I can assemble with others to complain about the government. I can petition the government for redress of grievances. I can practice a religion free of government interference. Most importantly, I have the right to speak my mind. I can say whatever I want about the government short of advocating violence against it. I am free to speak or write critically about the actions or inactions of my government.
I can be a critic of my government because for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of Americans before me fought and died for my right to do that. Full Story »
Remember when we all thought Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Malachi was just another Ahmed Pyle fresh off the bus from Palookadad?Now look at him: he’s a Machiavelli-class political operative, the head of a propped up state who just told his masters to drive it up their exit ramps by demanding that they honor the Status of Forces Agreement whether they like it or not.
Keep in mind, though, that in 1980 Saddam Hussein sentenced Maliki to death.Now Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death and executed, and Maliki has his job.How about them apples?Maliki is so powerful today, in fact, that he may be the only political figure who can help Barack Obama—the head of state of the most powerful nation in history—out of the crack he’s wiggled himself into. Full Story »
I expect the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a newspaper I’ve long admired, to go belly up — even though I have no specific information about its finances and whether it is, indeed, in danger of folding.
But this week, it gave its product to me for free. I would have gladly paid up to 5 cents to read just one of its stories. But the JS didn’t charge me. What kind of business model allows me to consume a product for free?
I learned of the story through an e-mailed version of Romenesko, the legendary (or infamous, depending on your POV), media news page at Poynter. org, the Web site of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.
The Poynter e-mail contained this tease: “Wisconsin university football coach bans student reporters (http://www.jsonline.com/business/43539347.html).” I clicked on the link and —ta da — there it was, a story written by JS reporter Don Walker. Free. Didn’t have to pay a penny. And I would have. Gladly.
I know this isn’t a rare phenomenon. I suspect you’ve read news for free online, too. Bet you kinda expect it to be free, even demand that it be free. Perhaps you think it’s some kind of birthright. But in the long run, if you do not pay for the product of professional journalists, you will lose one of your best defenses against secrecy, corruption, and tyranny. Full Story »
We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. - Natalie Maines
I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching. - Merle Haggard
Last night over dinner the subject of The Dixie Chicks came up, and I got mad all over again. Which is unfortunate, because when you think about artists that talented the last thing on your mind ought to be anger. But still, it’s been six long years now since “the top of the world came crashing down,” and I can’t quite free myself of my rage at the staggering ignorance that led so many Americans to piss on the 1st Amendment by attempting to destroy the careers of Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Full Story »
Those who own a property have the right to continue owning that property, and what they do with their justly owned and acquired property is entirely their own look-out.
If you happen to be the owner of a unique piece of art, say the Mona Lisa, and you decide to set fire to it, then that is a terrible tragedy, but it is your property. No government should ever have the right to intervene.
Apartheid in South Africa was a crime against humanity. You can argue the reasons. Some say that it was racial prejudice translating into attempted genocide. Others that it was a violation of human rights of equality and justice. Full Story »
We are witnessing what a military takeover of a superpower looks like in the new American century.David Pertraeus became the most dangerous American general since Douglas MacArthur when George W. Bush announced that his “main man” would decide when, how and if an Iraq troop drawdown would occur, giving Petraeus unilateral control of U.S. foreign policy.In the summer of 2008, when then candidate Barack Obama started talking about a 16-month withdrawal deadline and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said that sounded about right, you could almost hear Petraeus screeching What a world! What a world! from Baghdad to Washington.If you listened closely, you also heard the propaganda campaign to sell America on an endless occupation of Iraq click into high gear.Full Story »
Gay marriage will open the door to incest, to polygamy, and every conceivable marriage arrangement demented minds can possibly conceive. If God does not then punish America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.
In 1977, former president Richard Nixon offered up some interesting thoughts on the concept of legality.
FROST: So what in a sense, you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.
NIXON: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.
Well, here’s a fine howdy-do: Rick Warren, pastor of the mother of all mega-churches, has been tapped to channel Jesusconduct a seancedeliver the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Because Warren is, you know, a “moderate.”
…in 2004 Warren declared that marriage, reproductive choice, and stem cell research were “non-negotiable” issues for Christian voters and has admitted that the main difference between himself and James Dobson is a matter of tone. He criticized Obama’s answers at the Faith Forum he hosted before the election and vowed to continue to pressure him to change his views on the issue of reproductive choice. He came out strongly in support of Prop 8, saying “there is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … Full Story »
In this season’s eighth episode, Boston Legal - the relentlessly liberal ABC dramedy starring William Shatner and James Spader - lobbed an absolute bomb at those of us on the pro-choice side of the Roe v. Wade question. The bunker-buster was posed, predictably enough, by Crane Poole & Schmitt’s resident conservative, the gleefully Republican Denny Crane, portrayed by Shatner. BL fans know Crane to be positively Cheney-esque in his politics (although he did finally cross the aisle to vote for Obama because even he couldn’t stomach four more years like the last eight), and he routinely plays the straw man for the passionate liberalism of Spader’s litigator par excellence, Alan Shore.
This time, though, Crane (who’s battling through the early stages of Alzheimer’s) breaks through to a moment of pristine, Emmy-worthy clarity. Full Story »
Let me return to a period which is widely regarded within the advanced industrial societies as a high water mark of public service broadcasting, the BBC in the early 1960s. A key figure from those years was Sir Arthur fforde (that is the correct, if old-fashioned spelling of his name), in my view quite possibly the greatest of the chairmen of the BBC. In 1963 he published a little booklet called What is Broadcasting About, which was printed privately in an edition of 400. In this at first curious piece he tries to lay out a theological context for what was happening within the BBC, which was then at the height of its creative and social impact on British society, and causing all kinds of heartburn among what used to be called the Establishment. Full Story »
Don’t miss my investigative report over at Raw Story:
Interviews with numerous legal experts suggest that Colorado US Attorney Troy Eid misled reporters and diverged from state law when declining to prosecute any of the three men arrested in Denver for threatening to assassinate Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.
The article includes pretty shocking exclusive comments from the Weld County CO investigator who had pursued the main suspect, Sean Robert Adolph, for two years:
According to a federal affidavit, one of the men arrested, Nathan Dwaine Johnson, said that another in the group, Sean Robert Adolph, had come to Denver to shoot Obama during his DNC acceptance speech. Johnson told the Secret Service that Adolph said “it wouldn’t matter if he killed Obama because he was going to jail on his pending felony charges anyway.”
Vicki Harbert, an investigator at the Weld County, Colo., sheriff’s department, who had pursued Adolph since 2006, told RAW STORY, “It’s very easy to see Adolph saying something like that. He had nothing to lose. With his criminal history, he was going to jail for the rest of his life.” Full Story »
Vice-presidential candidate Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) ran into a buzzsaw of an interview from Barbara West of WFTV-TV, Channel 9, in Orlando, Fla on October 23. West is the wife of Wade West, a GOP political and media consultant, and her bias was evident as she made more than one statement of opinion, as though it were fact, then proceeded to ask a question related to that opinion/faux fact. The exchange making the rounds most often in the blogosphere is this one:
West: “You may recognize this famous quote: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ That’s from Karl Marx. How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around.”
“Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
So on to the really interesting part: what has it all meant, what do I take away from this curious episode in my life, and from a decade-long involvement not just in the narrative around the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, but the cultural ecology out of which that narrative climbed?
Henry James once wrote that to be an American is a complex fate, a sentiment I’d like to amend by suggesting that to be alive is a complex fate, pulled asunder as we are by the competing forces of deep, unspoken Neolithic urges, the demands of the caring heart and struggles in usingdavid the Rational mind, all elements present in the World of JonBenet.
Three general issues suggest themselves: Full Story »
There had earlier been another development that caught the attention of the local US intelligence services based in the embassy. In July Daxis had told me that he had got a job teaching in an international school and that while there for the interview he had “made some lovely new friends ~ little girls age five…” In a mail on July 13 he mentioned one in particular, adding “I lust for a little five year old at school…” He wrote to me of how he had massaged her bare foot and how she said to him, laughing, “…you’re a monster” except that because of her accent it came out as “monsta.”
DNA
The only rational conclusion was to assume the worst and that he had his next target. Full Story »
In the mid-1980s David Mills had tried to get a budget together to make a documentary based on my work on public broadcasting, making the case that market forces would prove disastrous for broadcasting as a means of serving the public interest. We would also argue that deregulation, along the lines of American television, would be deeply unfortunate, along with the more nuanced argument that there is, anyhow, no such thing as de-regulation – there is only regulation (ie someone making decisions about content) in the public interest or a private interest. Culture is never, finally, neutral.
Several incidents in particular focused my attention not on the murder but on how we seemed to be dealing with it as a culture. In March 1997 the CU branch of the Society of Professional Journalists organized a forum on cheque book journalism, particularly as it related to the Ramsey case. The panel consisted of two reporters from the National Enquirer, a reporter for the cable tabloid programme Hard Copy and Chuck Green of the Denver Post. Green, a strangely bitter, cynical man was known to be hyper-critical of the investigation, and of the role of the DA’s office in pursuing the case and in what Green took to be the protection of the Ramseys.
“…it’s not an important story, but it’s entertaining” Full Story »
SHE pass’d away like morning dew
Before the sun was high;
So brief her time, she scarcely knew
The meaning of a sigh.
As round the rose its soft perfume,
Sweet love around her floated;
Admired she grew–while mortal doom
Crept on, unfear’d, unnoted.
Love was her guardian Angel here,
But Love to Death resign’d her;
Tho’ Love was kind, why should we fear
But holy Death is kinder?
- Hartley Coleridge
On August 16 2006 MSNBC broke the story that an arrest had been made in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a pretty 6 year old girl, winner of several beauty pageants, who had been garroted and bludgeoned to death on Christmas night 1996 in Boulder, Colorado. Full Story »
How DARE you stand on that stage, on the shoulders of generations of women who have struggled and sacrificed to allow a woman to achieve what you have, and spit in their faces the way you have done over the past few weeks? For a serious candidate for vice president to turn in such a poor performance in interview after interview that the fact that you managed not to pee on the stage meant that you exceeded many people’s expectations is a crying shame. Full Story »
In 1977, former president Richard Nixon offered up 
Well, here’s a fine howdy-do: Rick Warren, pastor of the mother of all mega-churches, has been tapped to 
by Michael Tracey
Vice-presidential candidate Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) 
As round the rose its soft perfume,
by Nan Rhyner
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